Parsifal checked his house to make certain that he had not left any water running or pots on the stove. Then he walked outside and in the direction of the bus station, noticing in the process that the circle of the blind had filled with new walkers. A few of the blind people parted to let him through and then, after he had passed, the circle closed again.
Were the blind growing in numbers? It seemed as though they might be.
Above his head, the bird was circling. Or making spirals.
“Au revoir,” Parsifal told the blind men.
To see you again.
Parsifal was about halfway to the bus station when he heard the distinctive whir of a new kind of bomb that, he had read, the sky was using: dozens of ball bearings taken out of the crankshafts of vehicles and then released all at once, blanketing an area. According to the reports, this would soon be followed by the pieces of the actual crankshaft. It was deadly, of course, but the commentary regarding the choice of weapons was divided. Some believed it represented an advance on the part of the sky, while others were of the opinion it was a sign that whoever was in charge of this was running out of things to drop. He couldn’t be sure if the sound of the descending bearings was more like a waterfall, a fountain, or a single strum of a harp, and knew that although it should have been easy to tell one from the other, for some reason it wasn’t.
The silence of a falling star
When Parsifal reached the bus station he could no longer see the bird.
Back in the forest, Parsifal took a little time every day to imagine Conrad, his father, working at his office in the city. In Parsifal’s mind, Conrad sits, wearing his dark, pin-striped suit of fine wool, in his stuffed leather desk chair with wheels and an adjustable back. Meanwhile, as the manicured fingers of one of his father’s hands flip through a stack of stock prospectuses, the other holds a phone to his ear, listening to a client. Behind Conrad stands his secretary, whose name, Parsifal knows, is Margot, and she is dressed in a light blue business suit. True, the skirt is possibly cut too short to technically qualify as proper business attire, but still — according to his father — it’s well within the limits of good taste. Meanwhile, Margot massages his father’s shoulders, then pauses to reach forward slightly over him, her breast just brushing his father’s arm as she brings a steaming cup of cappuccino to Conrad’s lips, which are dry from so much listening. The coffee cup is filled to the very top with whipped cream.
Near Conrad, on the floor, kneels Jimmy, the traveling shoeshine boy who carries his homemade box stuffed full of rags and polish from office to office all day long. The boy is forced to use the stairs — his father once reported to Parsifal, Conrad’s voice rising with indignation — because to see him on the elevator, his sneakers falling apart, his hair poking out beneath his filthy cap, offends the so-called “better-class” folks who need to ride the elevator up and down to their offices each day.
“A disgraceful situation,” Conrad told his son, “but you must understand that the ways of capitalism can be cruel at times.” Conrad also told Parsifal that Jimmy coughed frequently because he suffered from a chronic lung disorder.
Meanwhile, cough, cough.
“What’s that noise?” Parsifal’s father’s client asks him on his end of the phone.
“Oh that,” Conrad answers. “I was just moving some furniture around.”
And so, Jimmy, his fingers dark with polish, caresses Parsifal’s father’s shoes, a happy smile on his lips, because, having to support not only himself but also his mother and his crippled sister, he is glad to be working for a client as generous as the one before him at that moment, by whom he means Parsifal’s father. Margot looks down at the young boy and smiles.
“If only you could be as self-sufficient as young Jimmy,” Conrad used to admonish Parsifal, and then he would follow this wish with some new, heartbreaking detail from the shoeshine boy’s life for Parsifal to mull over.
The bus station was packed as usual. It had been that way ever since air traffic had been suspended due to the attacks, or whatever they were, from the sky. All around Parsifal people were weeping, laughing, greeting friends and family, or just standing dazed from having to get up and walk around after sitting for so many hours. Some buses, of course, had cramped restrooms in the rear, but generally they were too filled with cigarette smokers or irritable bowel sufferers to allow anyone else much access. Around Parsifal, brawny drivers strode about in smart gray uniforms, carrying overnight bags and wearing mock military caps with badges of ringed golden tires on their peaks. Many were former airline pilots put out of business by the general idleness of airplanes.
Also, there were vendors selling from colorful carts, magazine stands, and stands where people could buy tapes with inspirational messages, as well as places to download music, for a fee, into their music players. Mingling unobtrusively with the crowd were plainclothes cops on the alert for pickpockets, bunko artists, and sellers of forged bus tickets that could be purchased for a fraction of the price of a real one and worked just as well. Parsifal approached one of these fake-ticket sellers, a nicely dressed gentleman wearing a bright green vest who was leaning on a coffee machine and had indicated he might have a few tickets available by means of first rubbing his fingers together and then putting his hands into his armpits and discreetly raising and lowering his elbows.
Just to be sure, Parsifal asked, “Do you have any tickets to the forest?”
The man named a price.
“I’ll take one.”
“Hey pal, you’ve got yourself a real bargain.”
“Thanks.”
When he first arrived in the city, Parsifal was assigned a public health social worker. She had him take a bath, bought him a new set of clothing made of denim, burned his old clothes, and found him a room at the YMCA. She then enrolled him in the local high school and gave him enough money to live on. When he graduated from high school, which didn’t take long because of the excellent training his parents had given him, it was up to him to find a new place to stay and a job.
The sadness that seeps into my heart.
Sometimes Parsifal wondered how his parents ever met.
“It was at a dance,” his mother once told him, and when he pressed her for details she claimed not to remember. “The only thing I could think about the whole time I was there was your father,” Pearl said.
But what kind of dance could it have been in the middle of the forest?
One afternoon, waiting for a librarian to get off work, Parsifal read about mountain climbing. The book stated that at times a climber can go thirty or forty feet straight up without a problem, and then the climber will hit a ledge that may take half a day to get around.
The book said that climbers climbed because it was there.
“It” being the mountain.
That same afternoon, he found a book about fountain pens. It was then, undistracted by the snores and snuffles of others using the library, that he rekindled his interest in fountain pens, which had begun so many years ago in the forest but until that moment had lain dormant.
The bus driver turned out to be one of the very same men Parsifal had witnessed earlier carrying an overnight bag and striding confidently across the bus terminal. His name, according to the rectangular plastic label made to look like metal on the front of his gray uniform, was Nick. He told Parsifal to take a seat. Then he returned to looking at something on a clipboard and began to rev the engine. His hair was brown and starting to thin.